A SAS Christmas tree

A few colleagues and I were exchanging short snippets of SAS code that create Christmas trees and other holiday items by using the SAS DATA step to arrange ASCII characters. For example, the following DATA step (contributed by Udo Sglavo) creates a Christmas tree with ornaments and lights:

If you delete some unnecessary spaces, you can produce the Christmas tree in 90 characters. As a result, the DATA step is short enough to post on Twitter! So tweet the following message to all of your SAS friends!

Can you do better? One of my colleagues create a 76-character DATA step that produces a plain Christmas (with a star (*) on top) made entirely of the '0' character. Use the comments to post your favorite SAS code that spreads holiday cheer!

About Author

Rick Wicklin, PhD, is a distinguished researcher in computational statistics at SAS and is a principal developer of PROC IML and SAS/IML Studio. His areas of expertise include computational statistics, simulation, statistical graphics, and modern methods in statistical data analysis. Rick is author of the books Statistical Programming with SAS/IML Software and Simulating Data with SAS.